He performs in international venues. People from around the world seek out his creations. But shadow puppet master and maker Ki Ledjar Soebroto remains largely unrecognized in his own country.

It appears that the 71-year-old from Yogyakarta, who will perform at the Tong Tong Fair in the Netherlands in May, is destined only ever to find popularity abroad.

"I don't know who I am supposed to complain to if my fellow artists have the heart to betray their own peer," he says in his modest home and showroom on Jl. Mataram, east of Yogyakarta's Malioboro shopping street.

This is not his only complaint - since he began crafting wayang kancil (leather puppets in animal form) in the 1980s, he said, people have put names of other artisans to his work.

"Take a look at this," said Ki Ledjar, pointing out a page in a wayang encyclopedia published in Jakarta. "This is obviously my work, ordered from me, with my name etched on it. So why would this wayang be said to have been made by a Chinese man, Lie Bo Liem, in 1925?"

He claims that his intellectual property rights have been denied both by individuals and by institutions such as the wayang museum at Taman Mini Indonesia Indah in Jakarta and Sonobudoyo Museum in Yogyakarta. There again, he says, pieces of his work are displayed as the 1925 craftsmanship of Bo Liem - even with his full name etched on them in Javanese characters.

"I've never even seen the shapes of wayang kancil that were made by Bo Liem or those said to have come from the Mangkunegaran family or religious propagators. I created the puppets out of my own imagination. And," he adds, "if any documentation of the old heritage is indeed available, please let me know."

In addition to wayang purwo, which features characters taken from the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, wayang history records the existence of wayang kancil (literally, mouse-deer puppets) with animal characters, meant for religious or educational purposes. However, over time, the latter disappeared.

In 1980, Ki Ledjar sought to revive this lost tradition from his own imagination, crafting the puppets out of buffalo hide, keeping "the name wayang kancil even though I'd never seen the original form."

Ki Ledjar's version of wayang kancil is a leather puppet performance mostly based on the well-known Javanese fable Kancil Nyolong Ketimun (A mouse-deer stealing cucumbers).

The original source of the fable is Serat Kantjil, a literary work written by RP Sasrawijaya in 1804. He drew on his puppet manipulation and narrative skills, learned when he was an apprentice of noted puppeteer Ki Narto Sabdo in the 1950s, and began to perform the play with his own puppets.

He says he did this to counter young Indonesians' declining interest in wayang purwo.

As he suspected the lack of interest could be because a conventional shadow puppet performance usually ran from dusk to dawn, he hoped his modified form could be a step toward helping children access the art at a higher level.

Children warmly welcomed his innovation.

Since then, Ki Ledjar has performed his two-hour shows in a number of places, using puppets and characters already familiar to children, accompanied not only by the traditional gamelan but sometimes also by other musical instruments.

"We can appear beyond the Javanese community, with which wayang, to cover areas outside Java by adapting the performance to local dialects and musical traditions," he says.

Word of Ki Ledjar's creations later reached other countries and students - both from Indonesia and overseas - wrote theses on his form of puppet play. Private collectors and international museums also began to seek out his leather puppets.

But despite this success, Ki Ledjar, once a makeup artist of the Javanese classical dance-drama troupe Wayang Orang Ngesthi Pandawa in Semarang, remains disappointed by the poor appreciation by wayang observers and his peers at home.

That his name is etched on his pieces in Javanese characters seems to mean nothing to them, he complains - only foreigners respect his rights.

"I haven't patented my creations but they should be aware of it. Even the foreigners, who mostly hold doctorates, recognize wayang kancil as my innovation," Ki Ledjar points out, adding that his show at the Dutch Tong Tong fair is a regular appearance for him.

His resentment has not made him stop working. He has continued to create his novel pieces of the wayang art because of the positive response from foreign observers. His innovations have included Wayang Sultan Agung in 1987, a puppet made to depict the struggle of Sultan Agung against the Dutch troops under Jan Pieter Zoon Coen. Then there were the wayang revolusi, representing the revolutionary figures of 1945.

In 2002, he created wayang kartun, based on the Japanese Samurai X comic, which he made for the performance of Japanese puppeteer Ryoh Matsumoto. Wayang jaka tarub followed in 2004 for the joint performance of wayang and ketoprak (a popular play retelling historical episodes) in Yogyakarta.

Wayang kontemporer also appeared as a current version, featuring cartoon figures such as Batman, Spider-Man, and international figures widely reported in the media.

Ki Ledjar, now active in the Yogyakarta Puppeteers Organization, has opened his showroom where, as well as selling both novel and traditional leather puppets, he creates wayang wajah - portraits in wayang medium, which cost about Rp 750,000.

"Many foreign tourists have ordered wayang with their faces and they are proud to have their pictures designed in leather puppet form."

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